Several letters to the editor published in The Washington Post on Saturday strongly criticized the Matt Schudel obituary of Marine Gen. Carl Mundy from April 6. Favorable obituaries are more likely for left-wing radicals like "visionary scientist" Barry Commoner, to recall Schudel's recent work.
It began by noting the general offended liberals (without using the L-word): “Carl E. Mundy Jr., a retired four-star general who, as commandant of the Marine Corps in the early 1990s, oversaw troop reductions in the wake of the Cold War and whose statements on race, women and gays in the military provoked widespread criticism, died April 2 at his home in Alexandria, Va.” What followed was a long list of offenses against liberal political correctness with no debate allowed from Mundy’s point of view:
Matt Schudel
Leftist author Joe McGinniss drew several more warm obituaries from the national media. In Wednesday’s Washington Post, on the front of the Style section Gene Weingarten began with a gush: “Joe McGinniss, author of one of the best nonfiction books ever written, died yesterday.”
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik filed an entire story on McGinniss (and it was no Harold Simmons hatchet job on political attack ads). Folkenflik went easy on the last slimy McGinniss book, his full-throttle, fact-challenged attack on Sarah Palin:
The obituary pages of Wednesday’s Washington Post displayed a very obvious bias in labeling two political figures. On page B7, the Post honored radical-left ecologist Barry Commoner. The Post’s Matt Schudel began: “Barry Commoner, a visionary scientist and author who helped launch the environmental movement in the United States and whose ideas influenced public thinking about nuclear testing, energy consumption, and recycling, died Sept. 30 at a hospital in New York.”
There was no ideological labeling in the piece. Younger Americans would remember Commoner as the radical who ran for president in 1980 with a radio ad with an actor saying “Bulls--t! Carter, Reagan and Anderson, it's all bulls--t!" That candidacy drew one sentence. Then consider how they “honored” conservative former Arizona congressman Sam Steiger on page B8:
Actor Chad Everett, best known for his role as Dr. Joe Gannon on the CBS drama Medical Center in the 1970s, died of lung cancer at age 75. Oddly, obituary writers in both the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post dragged out an old incident from 1972, when Everett -- identified in both newspaper articles as a "conservative Republican" -- upset feminist Lily Tomlin on the Dick Cavett Show as he mocked his wife, the actress Shelby Grant.
Everett and Grant married in 1966 and stayed married until she died last year. This is how Matt Schudel revisited it in the Post: